Tell MedBlog your bedside stories from the front lines of medicine

If Internet chatter is any indication, physicians and medical students have lots to say about their experiences with patients.

Jasmin Merdan | Fotolia

That’s one reason we’ve started a new category called Bedside manner on MedBlog where we’ll discuss encounters between patients and medical professionals.

The idea came from an editor’s passed-along link to The Student Doctor Network, an online forum which touts itself as “an educational community of tens of thousands of students and doctors … internationally recognized as the most active academic health community in world.”

In this thread, emergency medicine professionals tell some of their best horror stories from the ER. (Go to the last page for the most recent entries.)

Here are some hilarious edited samples (the Rated PG versions):

Tonight I learned yet another helpful life lesson from one of my patients. If you’re on the street corner selling coke (cocaine) and you see the cops coming to bust you, don’t eat all your coke. Having been taught this valuable lesson I will now know better than to do this and wind up going to the ER in handcuffs, seizing uncontrollably, aspirating my vomit and doing all of this with a white powder moustache looking like and ad for “Got Coke?”

No matter how badly you need narcotics, injecting stool into your IV line and into your hip to give yourself a legitimate infection CANNOT POSSIBLY BE THE BEST WAY to get them.

If you get into a minor MVA (motor vehicle accident) with a semi-truck, make sure to give the nurse your girlfriend’s stripper advertisement card so he will “know her when she gets here.”

One of the quickest ways to receive a death stare from the patient: Make a seemingly innocuous comment about, “starting off on the right foot,” to the guy sitting there with amputations just above the knee on both legs.

Medical professionals: Is it true that some patients really carry on in the emergency room? Do you identify with these tales of the practice? Care to share your latest slap-yourself gaffe?

If you’re a doctor, nurse or otherwise on the front lines of medicine, tell us your bedside stories.

Comments are anonymous, of course. And if this medical student message board is any indication, there’s a lot to whisper and wince about!